I. Does Race Matter? SUNY Binghamton, October 1996

Soon after the beginning of the student protests at SUNY Binghamton
in October 1996, participants as well as critical spectators debated the scope and
significance of the questions the protesters had raised. Among participants and
supporters, topics of debate ranged from police brutality and the detrimental consequences
of privatizing public universities to alternatives to forms of political representation in
which the defeat of minorities is constitutive rather than accidental. Conservative
critics, most often publicizing their views in the Heritage Foundation-sponsored Binghamton
Review, interpreted this broad range of concerns as lack of a unified strategy and
agenda and argued that the protesting "multiculturalists" were demonstrating
nothing other than the intellectual and political bankruptcy of their "world
view." The starting point for the following attempt at discussing the concepts of
"race" and "whiteness" was provided, however, by what I perceived to
be a curious commonality between protesters and their critics: "race," it was
often said, ought not to become a focal point. Through examples as disjunctive as a recent
newspaper article on "black achievement," the role accorded to Native Americans
in early debates on immigration restriction, and some of the legal aspects of
suburbanization, I hope to suggest that a discussion of "race" employing terms
other than those provided by the languages of liberal individualism and cultural pluralism
could become the starting point of another, broad-based organizing effort.

Most of the student authors publishing in the Binghamton Review
sarcastically interpreted the various educational events, sit-ins, and forums as an
irrational attempt at reviving an multiculturalism they believe to have been exposed as
self-contradictory and ultimately defeated. According to these writers, the social reality
of "color-blindness" and "procedural equality" has rendered race as a
term of articulating and understanding social relations hopelessly inadequate and
institutional support specific to individual groups other than the universal
"we" of a (presumably) larger and more inclusive collectivity unnecessary. On
the contrary, the arguments continued, affirmative action, diversity requirements, and
other institutional manifestations of multiculturalism constitute a form of minority
restitution unjustly imposed on innocent descendants of a culture once, but certainly no
longer, insensitive to alterity. While conservative critics asserted that "race"
is effectively subsumed under neutral categories of achievement and should therefore no
longer direct social analysis, many participants and supporters argued that a
race-centered discussion would deflect attention from the multi-ethnic character of their
organizing effort. In addition, such a discussion ought to contribute to an essentializing
of "race" critical discourses had been working so long to challenge by pointing
to the constructedness of such categories.

I wanted to respond to the argument that race has ceased to be an
adequate category of analyzing social distinctions not only because it ignores theperpetuation
of race-based segregation and discrimination but because it isitself symptomatic
of a discourse on race that, paradoxically, does not have to speak about it--a racism
without races that nevertheless continues to presuppose and reproduce radicalized
categories. All of the following examples illustrate that racial designations continue to
differ in their material significance, denoting varying access to resources and thus
vastly different chances for meritocratic "performance." What is more, every one
of these moments has, I believe, helped establish a notion of "whiteness" that
can afford to constantly disavow the material and theoretical presuppositions sustaining
it.

The success of referenda demanding that immigration be restricted
and affirmative action abolished have confirmed the perception that the parameters within
which the discussion of race and whiteness takes place are set mainly in suburbs that are
predominantly white and middle-class. Since of the white college students on our campuses
come from suburban locations where exposure to "otherness"-racial or
economic-has been limited, a discussion of "whiteness" requires some analysis of
how it became possible that suburbanites link the expectations of uninhibited social and
geographical mobility that appear to inform their political agendas to intrinsic
characteristics rather than heavily subsidized transportation systems and housing
conditions.

(This text is only a selection. For the
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